For Paul

A jigsaw with thirty-eight shapes put together.
But there’s this piece and this left over.
And this. Where’s this go? What could this
piece be? I can’t see how any of this
fits together, which might be sky, or ground,
even tell where the edges might be found.

The fact that you are gone screeches up
into our heads like a double-decker bus
full of crying children on a school trip,
one asking for Daddy, one feeling sick,
and over their babble I can’t make out
what’s happening, what this is all about.

It’s like too-difficult arithmetic, the root
of a ridiculous number, or the hypotenuse
of a roof on a building been built too high.
Nor can it be written into something right,
its adjectives not fitting the nouns, the verbs
not working simply written down as words

in the effort of making sense of a world
that’s now non-sensical. And there’s no turning
from this, or of this into something good,
or into something I’ve in any way understood.
But here it is, the irrevocable fact of you, gone.
And all the stars in heaven shining on.